As the Biden administration moves on an ever-growing list of policy initiatives, the White House issued sanctions this week for a slate of Russian misdeeds, including interference in the 2020 election, the poisoning of dissident Aleksey Navalny, and the SolarWinds hacking spree that swept United States government agencies and many private-sector companies. The retaliatory move […]
Over the last few years, researchers have found a shocking number of vulnerabilities in seemingly basic code that underpins how devices communicate with the internet. Now a new set of nine such vulnerabilities are exposing an estimated 100 million devices worldwide, including an array of internet-of-things products and IT management servers. The larger question researchers […]
A week into the revelation that Facebook leaked the data of 500 million users—including phone numbers and other potentially sensitive info—and the company still hasn’t given a full account of what happened. But we’ve managed to figure out both that the root of the problem was Facebook’s “contact import” feature, and that Facebook had plenty […]
A week into the revelation that Facebook leaked the data of 500 million users—including phone numbers and other potentially sensitive info—and the company still hasn’t given a full account of what happened. But we’ve managed to figure out both that the root of the problem was Facebook’s “contact import” feature, and that Facebook had plenty […]
Russia has implemented a novel censorship method in an ongoing effort to silence Twitter. Instead of blocking the social media site outright, the country is using previously unseen techniques to slow traffic to a crawl and make the site all but unusable for people inside the country. Research published Tuesday says that the throttling slows […]
Twitch is finally coming to terms with its responsibility as a king-making microcelebrity machine, not just a service or a platform. Today, the Amazon-owned company announced a formal and public policy for investigating streamers’ serious indiscretions in real life, or on services like Discord or Twitter. Last June, dozens of women came forward with allegations […]
Thanks in large part to the global pandemic, collaboration platforms like Discord and Slack have taken up intimate positions in our lives, helping maintain personal ties despite physical isolation. But their increasingly integral role has also made them a powerful avenue for delivering malware to unwitting victims—sometimes in unexpected ways. Cisco’s security division, Talos, published […]
This week, the Justice Department indicted a 22-year-old on charges of tampering with the water facility where he used to work. It’s a stark reminder that while the power grid gets most of the attention, it’s not the only piece of critical infrastructure that’s vulnerable to potentially devastating attacks. We also took a look at […]
From June 2019 until this February, 1.4 million people in Myanmar’s Rakhine state dealt with the longest government-mandated internet shutdown in history, targeted at the Rohingya ethnic minority that makes up most of Rakhine’s population. The connectivity blackout finally ended at the beginning of February, days after Myanmar’s military deposed democratically elected officials and seized […]
In January 2019, Wyatt Travnichek left his job at the Post Rock Rural Water District, whose 1,800 miles of water-main pipe supply customers across eight counties in the dead center of Kansas. Two months later, prosecutors say, he logged back in to the facility’s computer system and proceeded to tamper with the processes it uses […]